The Pangs of Distress

(Mt 24:6-8) You are going to hear of wars and reports of wars; see that you are not terrified. For these things must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be food shortages and earthquakes in one place after another. All these things are a beginning of pangs of distress.

What the phrase means

TThe Greek word is the word for the pains of childbirth. Birth pangs do not arrive once. They come in waves, and each wave is closer, longer and harder than the one before, until the birth. Jesus chose the word deliberately. He was describing a phase that intensifies, not a single sign, and he said plainly that when it begins "the end is not yet." The pangs open the sequence; they do not close it.

Where they sit in the sequence

Matthew 24 moves from the pangs of distress (verses 6-8), to persecution and apostasy (verses 9-13), to the good news preached in all the earth (verse 14), to the disgusting thing standing in a holy place (verse 15), to the great tribulation (verse 21), and only then to the sign of the Son of man (verse 30). Daniel gives the same order from another angle. The king of the north is turned back by the ships of Kittim and turns against the holy covenant (Daniel 11:29-30), honors the god of fortresses (Daniel 11:38), plants his tents in the holy land and comes to his end (Daniel 11:45), and then "Michael will stand up" and a time of distress unlike any before begins (Daniel 12:1).

Not 1914

The teaching that the pangs of distress began in 1914 rests on an invisible presence of Christ that no one saw and on a beast from the abyss that has to rise twice to make the dates fit. Jesus warned against exactly this kind of announcement.

(Lu 21:8) He said: "Look out that you are not misled; for many will come on the basis of my name, saying, 'I am he,' and, 'The due time has approached.' Do not go after them."

A false start date works as a sedative. If the decisive event is already behind you, the warnings meant to keep you awake lose their force. The studies on this site treat the pangs of distress as still ahead of the great tribulation and read current events against Daniel 11 rather than against a calendar fixed a century ago.

What to do with them

Jesus did not give the signs so that dates could be set. He gave them so that the people watching would recognize the season and lift their heads (Luke 21:28). The right response to the pangs of distress is to know the sequence, to get out of Babylon the Great before her fall, and to be ready to hear the two witnesses when they begin to prophesy.